One social science base for educational administration proposed in the Baron and Taylor collection was organisation theory. In the event this expectation turned out to be over-optimistic. Organisation theory was much too contested and insufficiently pragmatic for the British taste. Major developments in this field occurred mainly in the USA.…

The review of the National Curriculum and the centenary of the First World War have emphasised an orthodox patriotic and nostalgic historical ideal. The British coalition Conservative-Liberal government has aligned itself with the centenary commemorations of the First World War, while the war as social and political history may be in danger of…

Initiatives to cultivate character and virtue in moral education at school continue to provoke sceptical responses. Most of those echo familiar misgivings about the notions of character, virtue and education in virtue -- as unclear, redundant, old-fashioned, religious, paternalistic, anti-democratic, conservative, individualistic, relative and…

In educational politics, Caroline Benn (1926-2000) played a leading role in the British comprehensive reform. Wife of one of the most prominent post-war socialists in Britain, the aim is to use Caroline's long campaign alongside teachers, trade unions, parents, progressive academics and activists as a starting point with which to explore a…

The article investigates the spread of one of the first pedagogical concepts available worldwide during the first half of the nineteenth century: the monitorial system. Its wide diffusion depended, to a considerable extent, on the work of voluntary organisations. The article investigates the work of the two most important of these, the British and…

A governance model is developed in which university governance is shared between the academic and governing bodies and is coordinated by the university executive. Viewing the university as a professional service organisation, and noting the importance of developing a flexible culture within a shifting, marketised external environment, it is argued…

This article reports on the preliminary findings from a national UK study of the life histories of 28 Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) educators who led schools across a 47-year period (1968-2015). BAME head teachers were grouped by generations (i.e. pioneer, experienced, and novice) and questioned about the critical life experiences that…

In 1992 the binary divide between universities and polytechnics was dismantled to create a nominally unitary system of higher education for the UK. Just a year later, the first UK university league table was published, and the year after that saw the formation of the Russell Group of self-proclaimed "leading" universities. This paper…

The challenge of funding a high quality higher education system, ensuring it has the capacity to help meet the increasing demand for high level skills in our economy and the aspirations of our students, has been an ongoing concern for successive Australian governments over many years. This paper reviews the findings and recommendations of…

This article asks why classical music in the UK, which is consumed and practiced by the middle and upper classes, is being used as a social action program for working-class children in British music education schemes inspired by El Sistema. Through exploring the discourse of the social benefits of classical music in the late nineteenth century, a…

Historians have frequently referred to the British Association for the Advancement of Science as an institution that had the professionalisation of British science as its chief aim. This article seeks to complicate this picture by asking what, if any, concept of "professionalisation" would have been understood by nineteenth-century…

Why look back to imagine the future? Given the almost universal consensus that higher level technology-enhanced learning should lead in the design of school buildings, what place is there for low-level (non-digital) technologies in education? What can we learn from revisiting schools that were at one time seen to be internationally pioneering in…

In this paper we examine the creation and expansion of the English university system. We show how the enormous increase in student numbers, which began with the Robbins Report (1963), led to successive governments cutting universities' funding and compelling them to act more like business enterprises than educational institutions. In turn,…

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has a relatively long history in the United States, from where it originated, dating back to the 1980s. Its presence in UK academic literature, however, is more recent, having surfaced in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I focus in this paper on developments in CRT in the UK from January 2012 to January…

Once societies embarked on programmes of mass education home schooling became essentially a middle-class project and remains so. This paper looks at the educational experiences of some lower middle class women at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for whom the resources of the middle-class home were simply not available. It…